Pages

Friday, November 15, 2013

Abyssinian Dinners, circa 1780 and 1910.

It is probably a fair guess to say that most
of us are more aware of the military and political history of Ethiopia than of
its traditional ways. The problem, as always, is that what we do hear about the
day to day life of other nations and cultures is via the accounts of others who
have ‘been there, done that,’ and whose experiences have been filtered and coloured
by their own ignorances and prejudices.

Today I have two accounts of eating in
Ethiopia when it was still called Abyssinia. The accounts are over a century
apart, and I invite you to try to sift the information through your own
prejudice-free authenticity sieves!

The Border Morning Mail and Riverina Times (Albury, NSW) of
November 9, 1910 reproduced an article from the Westminster Gazette (London, England.)

A ROYAL DINNER PARTY IN ABYSSINIA.

The new Negus of Abyssinia, like his predecessors on the throne
before him, gives a public inner to all and sundry of his subjects once a week,
when they may feast to their heart's content. On the three great annual festivals
this 'gheber' becomes a spectacle probaly unequalled in the annals of Court
dinners. An Italian traveller who has recently been privileged to be present
describes it graphically in a letter to the 'Corriere.' The background of the
barn-like structure which serves as dining room is all but filled by the famous
throne-bed which the French Republic had presented to the late King Menelik;
the present Negus, on the occasion of the State dinner, sat on the edge of it
when the Emropean visitors, the first to enter the room, filed past him, each
one being received with a smile and a shake of the hand. As soon as they were
seated, and began to eat, King Jarsu also began, but his State dignitaries have
to wait till their lord, after a while, gives the sign that they also may fall
to.

THE MENU.

The Abyssinian Royal menu is sprung as a surprise on the European who
has expected either the food of primitive man or the concoctions of a French
chef. There are six courses but they do not vary, much, the chief ingredient of
all being the flesh of fowls. The table service is a curious medley of costly,
beautiful gold vessels and broken crockery of the cheapest kind. The Europeans
use knives and forks, the Abyssianians are fed by slaves. A strange silence pervades
the room during the three hours from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., while the feast is
going on and you hear the distant sound of the great crowd waiting impatiently,
for admittance, and the beating of the drums in honour of the archangel
Gabriel, at the church close by.

THE FEASTING OF THE MULTITUDE.

The moment the Europeans have ended their meal the curtains are drawn
aside, and through every door the stream of natives pours in. There are eight
tables, each one in charge of an overseer and four assistants, and from five to
six thousand Abyssinians are in an incredibly short time engaged in feeding and
talking at the same time at the top of
their voices. Each table is served by eight slaves, who are kept hard at work
supplying the diners with great lumps of raw meat, with which they eat the
leaves of a native vegetable, the anghera. They eat enormous quantities of
both, drinking honey water, the national beverage, out of gigantic horns. As
soon as one crowd is satisfied it has to make room for another, and all the
time the musicians are doing their utmost on trumpets, flutes, and other
instruments, to add to the deafening din. Last of all, a cluster of singers group
themselves round the Negus, chanting a hymn in his praise, of which, however,
he cannot possibly hear a single word. And so ends this cheerful State dinner
in the palace of the King of Kings.

I am puzzled by the “native vegetable,
anghera” mentioned in this story. There is a place called Anghera in Ethiopia,
and a huge variety of wild and indigenous plants, but I am unable to reconcile
the two. Strangely, the story makes no mention of injera – the staple Ethiopian pancake made traditionally from teff, which is present at all meals and
is used in the manner of a flat-bread. Surely the writer does not confuse injera
with the leaves of a plant?!

James Bruce (1730-1794) was a Scottish traveler
extraordinaire. He spent over a decade in North Africa and Abyssinia in the 1770's —1780’s,
and left an interesting account of a celebratory meal in the latter country,
which includes a rather gruesome description of butchering the meat, and of the
use of injera:

A long table is set in the middle of a large room, and benches
beside it for a number of guests who are invited. Tables, and benches the
Portuguese introduced amongst them; but bull hides, spread upon the ground, served
them before, as they do in the camp and country now. A cow or bull, one or
more, as the company is numerous, is brought close to the door, and his feet
strongly tied. The skin that hangs down under his chin and throat, which I
think we call the dew-lap in England, is cut only so deep as to arrive at the
fat, of which it totally consists, and, by the separation of a few small blood
vessels, six or seven drops of blood only fall upon the ground. They have no
stone, bench, nor altar, upon which these cruel assassins lay the animal’s head
in this operation. I should beg his pardon indeed for calling him an assassin,
as he is not so merciful as to aim at the life, but, on the contrary, to keep
the beast alive till he be totally eat up. Having satisfied the Mosaical law,
according to his conception, by pouring these six or seven drops upon the
ground, two or more of them fall to work; on the back of the beast, and on each
side of the spine they cut skin deep; then putting their fingers between the
flesh and the skin, they begin to strip the hide off the animal half way down
his ribs, and so on to the buttock, cutting the skin wherever it hinders them
commodiously to strip the poor animal bare. All the flesh on the buttocks is
cut off then, and in solid, square pieces, without bones,or much effusion of
blood; and the prodigious noise the animal makes is a signal for the company to
sit down to table. There are then laid before every guest, instead of plates,
round cakes, if I may so call them, about twice as big as a pancake, and
something thicker and tougher. It is unleavened bread of a sourish taste, far
from being disagreeable, and very easily digested, made of a grain called teff.
It is of different colours, from black to the colour of the finest wheat bread.
Three or four of these cakes are generally put uppermost, for the food of the
person opposite to whose seat they are placed. Beneath these are four or five
of ordinary bread, and of a blackish kind. These serve the master to wipe his
fingers upon: and afterward the servant,‘for bread to his dinner.

Two or three servants then come, each with a square piece of beef
in their bare hands, laying it upon the cakes of teff, placed like dishes round
the table, without cloth or any thing else beneath them. By this time all the
guests have knives in their hands, and the men have the large crooked ones,
which they put to all sorts of uses during the time of war. The women have
small clasped knives, such as the worst of the kind made at Birmingham, sold
for a penny each. The company are so ranged that one man sits between two
women; the man with his long knife cuts a thin piece, which would be thought a
good beef-steak in England, while you see the motion of the fibres yet
perfectly distinct, and alive in the flesh. No man in Abyssinia, of any fashion
whatever, feeds himself, or touches his own meat. The women take the steak and
cut it lengthways like strings, about the thickness of your little finger, then
crossways into square pieces, something smaller than dice. This they lay upon a
piece of the teff bread, strongly powdered with black pepper, or Cayenne
pepper, and fossil salt, they then wrap it up in the teff bread like a
cartridge. In the mean time, the man having put up his knife, with each hand
resting upon his neighbour’s knee, his body stooping, his head low and forward,
and mouth open very like an idiot, turns to the one whose cartridge is first
ready, who stuffs the whole of it into his month, which is so full, that he is
in constant danger of being choked. This is a mark of grandeur. The greater the
man would seem to be, the larger piece he takes in his mouth; and the more
noise he makes in chewing it, the more polite he is thought to be. They have,
indeed, a proverb that says, “Beggars and thieves only eat small pieces, or
without making a noise.” Having dispatched his morsel, which he does very
expeditiously, his next female neighbour holds forth another cartridge, which
goes the same way, and so on till he is satisfied. He never drinks till he has finished
eating; and, before he begins, in gratitude to the fair ones that fed him, he
makes up two small rolls of the same kind and form; each of his neighbours
opens her mouth at the same time, while with each hand he puts their portion
into their mouths. He then falls to drinking out of a large handsome horn; the
ladies eat till they are satisfied, and then all drink together, “Viva la Joye
et la Jeunesse !” A great deal of mirth and joke goes round, very seldom with
any mixture of acrimony or ill humour.

Alas, I am unable to supply an authentic
Abyssinian recipe for you today, but as you all know, the coffee plant is native
to that country, for which we are eternally grateful, so a coffee recipe it must be.

Coffee was not commonly
used as an ingredient in past times, due to its expense and the difficulty of
preparing it at home in the days before the development of domestic machines or
the instant coffee powder. Nevertheless, a there are a few coffee recipes from
the time of James Bruce, and I previously gave you one for a coffee cream from1777. This required the use of several gizzards however, which you are unlikely
to have at hand, so here is a slightly easier version from the era – and as a
bonus it is from a Scottish cookery book.

Crème
de Caffé. Coffee-cream.

Mix four cups of good coffee, with
three half-pints of cream, and sugar according to teaste; boil it together, and
reduce it about one third; then add the yolks of eight eggs beat up, mix it
very well, and bake as the preceding*.

N.B. Observe, that the coffee must be done as if it was for drinking
alone, and settled very clear.

The
practice of modern cookery; adapted to families of distinction, as well as to
those of the middling ranks of life. …(Edinburgh in 1781) by George
Dalrymple.

2 comments:

Bruce also said that, in his exploration of Abyssinia, he lived for years on a diet of "raw meat and honey" without coming to harm.The Blue Nile by Alan Moorshead is a n excellent account of the exploration of this region.

It wouldn't surprise me if a European unfamiliar with Abyssinian culture were to mistake injera for a plant. After all, it doesn't remotely resemble Western bread, and it does look a little like part of an enormous morel.

An American government official who went to China with, I think, Nixon's people, said that at one of the state banquets there was a bowl of smooth white objects on the table. He took them for dumplings, but when he bit into one, he was surprised at the very thin, crunchy crust. He was wondering how the Chinese managed to create such a crust when he noticed a few guests looking at him very oddly. About then he realized he was eating a boiled egg...with the shell still on.